Web Forum Software in Elixir / Phoenix

I thought about writing a CMS in Elixir but there is a not so trivial problem:
Every CMS should have a plugin system (my opinion) and that plugin system should be manageable during runtime so the admin user can search, install, update and delete plugins while the application is running. But how do you do this in a language that uses a long running process and also needs to compile code? It’s tricky. You also have to take care of database migrations too (because plugins might need to store data). I am sure with a bit of magic trickery, you will be able to get something together, but how well does it work in the end?

There is a reason most CMS and even eCommerce systems are written in PHP. PHP makes those dynamic plugin systems quite easy because there is no long running process and no compilation involved.

Now you can say that people should just add a mix dependency and restart the Elixir process, but that is far from enduser friendly.

I was super optimistic about Firestorm in contrast to the incumbent for modern-day forum tech, Discourse, which is what Elixir Forum uses. Discourse is fairly pleasant and snappy as an end user, but it is a chore from an operator’s perspective because it’s Rails trying to do soft-realtime, and with a strange, bespoke deployment workflow that manages to undermine the value/repeatability/standardization of Docker-based deployment almost entirely. So much of the hand-wringing in that ancillary project is unnecessary in a BEAM environment, not that we don’t have our own wrinkles around deployment.

I’m disappointed but not surprised that Firestorm has fallen idle. Most crowdfunded, change-the-face-of-niche-software projects seem to do that. It never reached an especially usable state, the last time I checked in on it, although kudos to them for at least attempting to dogfood it.

In my opinion it has more to do with shared hosting. PHP (and MySQL) have been included with just about every shared hosting plan on the planet and is IMHO the main reason behind the popularity of PHP in general. I used PHP (and still need to) for years to that very reason. It isn’t until you actually need a long running process that you move on to greener pastures, like Python, node.js, and (now for me) Elixir.

There is a project that was started a while back but it hasn’t been updated in a good while: Contento